


If You Only Eat When You're Hungry

by scioscribe



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dysfunctional Relationships, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Lonely Alien Fucking, Minor Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau, Minor Carol Danvers/Minn-Erva, Post-Canon, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:35:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22206466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: She was everything Carol was, only meaner and wilder and vainer, and Maria could see how something deep in Carol had wanted to grab onto that, even if Minn-Erva was more worth touching than she was worth keeping.
Relationships: Maria Rambeau/Minn-Erva
Comments: 10
Kudos: 53
Collections: MCU Space Ships 2019





	If You Only Eat When You're Hungry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucymonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/gifts).



The sound of something touching down outside was so familiar to Maria, even now, that it was like an old lover pulling her grudging body out of bed, shoving her into her clothes, telling her her finger-combed hair would be good enough for her to face whatever bird Lawson had for them now.

She was out on the porch, standing there bare-armed in the sticky summer air, before she woke up enough to realize where she was. Louisiana.

Project Pegasus had been dead and buried for years. Lawson too.

It took her a minute to remember about Carol: Carol zigzagging back and forth between the dead and the living, her path through Maria’s life as brilliant and jagged as a bolt of lightning. It could be Carol had come back again. Except Carol’s Superman act hadn’t had that kind of sound to it, like a bee had buzzed itself into a coughing fit. Carol had sounded smooth.

Maria headed out into the darkness just past the porch light. The only sound now was the hum of the mosquitoes.

Her mouth had gone dry, like somebody was pressing a cotton ball down against her tongue.

“Carol?”

A woman’s voice answered her, bitter as black coffee: “Then I’m in the right place after all. If there even _is_ a right place on this shithole.”

* * *

She wound up hunched over Maria’s kitchen table, her elbows out, her arm hooked around a cereal bowl. A blue alien warrior sitting there in front of a plastic kid’s placemat, spooning Frosted Flakes into her mouth so quickly that milk was dripping from her lips. Her dark hair was stringy with grease and plastered against her sweat-shiny forehead; a long cut, healed just enough for an iridescent blue-black scab, ran across her cheek.

Maria didn’t know what to do with her. The Frosted Flakes had just been to buy time.

“You’re Kree,” she said. "There was a lot going on when we met, but I remember you."

“Actually, I’m one of the other blue-skinned aliens your backwater planet has running around. Totally unrelated to anything that’s happened lately.”

“What’s your name?”

The woman looked at her. She was holding her spoon so tightly that Maria could see the metal start to bend. “Minerva.”

No—Minn-Erva. Carol had said the Kree always broke their names in two. Mar-Vell. Maria could hear the fracture between the syllables when she listened for it.

“I’m Maria.”

“I don’t care.” Minn-Erva raised the bowl to her lips and drank from it, downing the last of the sugary milk. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She was clearly still just as much of a bitch as she’d been before she’d eaten something, but her eyes looked a little more alive now. It’d been six days since Carol had left her again. Minn-Erva must have been out there the whole time. She looked like it, too. One bowl of kid’s cereal shouldn’t have gotten her far enough way from six days of hunger to get her expression that sharp again, her eyes like flint arrowheads, but there it was.

Maria would have been better off not feeding her, probably.

Minn-Erva said, “You’re the one who shot down my ship. In the canyon.”

“No,” Maria said. “I’m one of the other Earth pilots running around shooting aliens out of the sky.”

“Shit.” Minn-Erva stuck one finger in her bowl and ran it along the bottom, gathering up whatever cereal-dust was left. She licked her finger clean. “You have her sense of humor. That’s fun.”

“What do you want?”

Minn-Erva rested her elbows on the table, leaning forward. “I just want to fix my ship and get off this ass-crack-of-nowhere world.”

“Carol sent your buddy back,” Maria said. “Yon-Rogg.”

There was a flash of something unreadable in Minn-Erva’s expression, almost a kind of bruised envy, although all she said, lightly, was, “That doesn’t help me, does it?”

Maria scrutinized her, looking over her body—her muscles like steel cords—and the sleek black-and-green Star Force suit, the wonders of which Carol had paraded out for her. Who even knew how many weapons she had on her. She was dangerous, there was no doubt about that. The right thing to do would be to call Agent Fury, whose business card was currently knocking around Maria’s junk drawer next to the batteries and spare rubber bands. He was the one who got paid to deal with this kind of thing. And he didn’t have a nine-year-old daughter asleep in bed just a couple rooms away from some alien scavenger with a vendetta.

But she’d dealt with dangerous things before. Having Carol flit back into her life, there and then gone again, had plugged her back into all the old, incautious reserves of adrenaline and stupidity she’d thought she’d left behind.

She’d been stranded out here, stuck on the sidelines.

Besides, she’d blown Minn-Erva out of the sky before. She could do it again.

She said, “We’d better establish some ground rules, then.”

“I’m all ears.”

“You need me,” Maria said. “You can’t get anything on your own here, not without going all one-woman-war against the whole planet. And if you do that, you lose.” That wasn’t anything Minn-Erva didn’t already know. She wouldn’t have lugged herself and her ship over all that terrain if she hadn’t understood exactly how slim her options were. “So if you even give me reason to think that you might be trouble—for me, for my daughter, for Earth—it’s all over. Right now, we’re on the same page. We both—”

“What page?” Minn-Erva said.

Maria couldn’t decide whether or not Minn-Erva was screwing with her. “It’s a figure of speech. I mean that right now, we both want the same thing.”

Minn-Erva’s smile mostly just looked like her mouth pulling tight, her lips thinning across her teeth. “For me to be far, far away from here.”

“Exactly.” She took the bowl away and put it in the sink. She needed to give her something more than cereal, probably, unless she wanted Minn-Erva roaming the house in the middle of the night like some kind of wolf on the prowl. “What do you eat?”

“Food.”

That turned out to be more or less accurate. Minn-Erva eventually copped to the Kree having some species-wide incompatibility with right-handed amino acids, which meant Maria had to dig up their raggedy garage sale encyclopedia before she could confirm that wouldn’t be a problem. After that, Minn-Erva devoured everything Maria put in front of her: a dish of scrambled eggs, two cartons of strawberry yogurt, a cold steak sandwich. Her expression said she ate it only because she was starving; her lips puckered around every bite like she wanted to spit it out. Your typical gracious houseguest.

“Come on,” Maria said finally, after she’d gotten tired of watching Minn-Erva tear into everything. She had a feeling down in the pit of her stomach—it was like the fear she’d felt outside turned inside-out. Like she was worried about what she’d do instead of worried about what might happen to her.

But when she reviewed her options, she kept coming up short of a good solution. If she left Minn-Erva outside, there’d be no way of knowing what she’d get up to.

Minn-Erva trailed along after her—still a wolf, but on a little bit of a leash now.

“You’re bunking with me,” Maria said. She chose the words carefully, leaning into the military side of things. “I don’t trust you anywhere else.”

“Right,” Minn-Erva said coolly.

“That’s all it is.”

Minn-Erva unsnapped her suit at its shoulder, peeling it back to bare a slanted triangle of dark blue skin. There was a mean kind of laughter in her face. “You used to fuck her, didn’t you. Vers. Carol. Whatever you want to call her. You were in _love_ with her. I always thought she used to look at me like she was trying to see someone else. Like if she just licked her fingers and ran them over me, she’d wipe my fucking face off completely.”

Maria took that in, all of it, and then said again, “I just don’t trust you anywhere else.”

Minn-Erva shucked her suit down to the ground and stood there, well-muscled and naked. “No?”

“Besides,” Maria said, “I don’t usually screw around with crazy.”

* * *

Minn-Erva ran hot when she slept. It was like trying to share a bed with a furnace.

Maria wound up awake most of that first night, sitting with her back against the headboard. Thinking. Not exactly staring at where the sheet lapped up against the curve of Minn-Erva’s ass, but not exactly not looking at it, either.

* * *

She’d been planning on herding Monica out to the bus stop before Monica and Minn-Erva could even come eye to eye, but for all her insomnia that night, she’d wound up dropping off just long enough for Minn-Erva to slip out around her. Maria found her back in the kitchen, eating peanut butter out of the jar with her fingers while Monica packed her backpack.

Minn-Erva gave Maria a pointed look over her jar of Jif, like she was saying, _Look, I didn’t hurt your offspring. All I’m doing is eating you out of house and home._

Monica was apparently taking Minn-Erva in stride—just one more top secret part of her life, not exactly as interesting as her back-from-the-dead aunt who could fly. She was just working on stacking up pudding cups, building whole towers of them in her backpack.

“Well, obviously if I leave them here, she’ll wind up getting through them by lunch,” Monica said.

“Smart girl,” Minn-Erva said. She dug up another gob of peanut butter. The expression on her face was something Maria associated with workouts—pushing yourself through something you had to do but didn’t like.

She said, “If you want something else to eat—”

“Everything you have tastes like glucose and petroleum,” Minn-Erva said. “I’m just replenishing calories.” She was back in her black uniform, and when she held up her forearm, Maria could see a kind of meter on it, still severely in the red. “It stores energy so we don’t die right away without food, as long as we’ve saved enough up beforehand. Usually we do nutrient absorption through protein strips to save time, but you don’t have the right materials.”

It was the most Maria had heard her say at once, and it was the politest she’d been, too, even if there was an implied “fuck you” stinger in the tail there.

“You don’t eat? Usually?”

“Not when we’re on duty.”

“That sounds boring,” Monica said. She hugged Maria. “I know, go off to school, don’t tell anybody about the alien. How long is she going to be here?”

Minn-Erva was the one who answered. "Longer than I'd like, I'm sure."

* * *

It turned out she’d made one hell of a wreck out of Minn-Erva’s ship. It looked like it’d been cobbled together from Swiss cheese and candle wax.

“You got it all the way here,” Maria said.

“Only by flying within the atmosphere, limping along, shields sputtering. It needs to survive hyperspace and a considerable journey.” Minn-Erva’s face had gone masklike. “Which it won’t do. Will it. Because your world’s too resource-poor to have the elements I need.” She tossed the tarp back over her ship and turned away from it, her body held so rigidly that Maria knew she was trying to keep herself from reacting any further.

Maria would have felt worse for her, stranded on an alien planet where she couldn’t even pass for normal, if Minn-Erva hadn’t tried to kill them, if she hadn’t been part of the group of people who’d julienned Carol’s memories.

But Carol had been with her, before. Even without her memories, Carol had still been some version of herself, and she’d climbed into bed with whoever she’d thought Minn-Erva was. Maria had to believe that anybody Carol had liked was somebody worth liking, at least a little, somebody who shouldn’t just be packed off to Area 51 or SHIELD in plain old good conscience.

“On the bright side,” Maria said, “at least you won’t have to worry about messing with protein strips. You’d just be able to make a sandwich.”

“Yeah. That was my biggest concern.”

“What are you going to do?”

Minn-Erva exhaled slowly, and a crispness came back into her voice. “Repurpose some of the parts and use them to send a signal. I’ll hitchhike or hijack my way home if I have to.” She turned halfway towards Maria and added grudgingly, “Starforce rewards anyone who quarters their officers. You’ll be compensated.”

“Just like the people you hijack, probably,” Maria said.

“I have to get home,” Minn-Erva said flatly, as if her doing that overrode what anybody else might want. “If someone loses a few hours off their pleasure cruise, I don’t really give a shit.” She stalked back to her ship and ducked under the tarp, yanking at something underneath it.

Maria did know what it was Carol had seen in her, actually. More or less. One of the only other women around, for one thing. Hot as hell, if the blue didn’t turn you off. And no tolerance at all for giving up, for failing. She was everything Carol was, only meaner and wilder and vainer, and Maria could see how something deep in Carol had wanted to grab onto that, even if Minn-Erva was more worth touching than she was worth keeping.

Maria wanted to touch her too. Grab onto her, even if it was only for an hour, even if Minn-Erva burned her hands.

She hadn’t slept with anybody in years. She’d never fucked a stranger; it was the men who did that, in and out of airbases, not the women who had to come back to the same old place no matter how much of the sky they traced over. She’d always had to go so slowly, be so damn sure that she could make a move without it ruining her career, without it risking her custody of Monica.

But now someone had just blown right up into her yard.

And God, she had trouble even figuring out what she wanted from it. She wanted to fuck Minn-Erva, sure. She wanted to fuck Carol, or the ghost of her, anyway. She wanted to get even with this woman for keeping Carol away from her for all those years—and maybe get even with Carol for leaving her again right when Maria had gotten her back. Whatever she was hoping for, it was nothing pretty.

She said, “How long do you think it’ll take for someone to pick up your signal?”

Minn-Erva resurfaced. “Days. Weeks. Months, maybe. You’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“That sounds like it would make it hard for you to send back compensation.”

“It would,” Minn-Erva said. She leaned back against the ship. Her eyes were dark, and there was a purplish flush along her cheekbones. “Maybe you’d like to be compensated now. In a way I couldn’t send back even if I remembered to, which honestly, I wouldn’t.” She moved with a kind of strut, a motion that said she’d done more killing, and more on-the-ground fighting, than Maria could even guess at, and when she laid her hand against Maria’s cheek, it had all the suddenness of a snakebite. “You’re lonely,” she said bluntly. “I’m pissed off. And you shot me down. We might as well.”

“Losing a fight really does it for you, huh?” Maria said. She could feel her lips brush against the heel of Minn-Erva’s hand.

Minn-Erva smiled a sharkish smile, all neat white teeth: “Fucking you is something like a rematch.”

She slotted her mouth against Maria’s and licked and bit at her, kissing with a ferocity that Maria wound up returning even though they were still out pretty much in the open, with nothing but half-open walls and trees around them for cover. She hated the slipperiness of Minn-Erva’s uniform, the way her hands kept gliding off of it when she wanted to get a grip on her hard enough to hurt.

“It’s sad that you can’t figure out clothes,” Minn-Erva said.

Maria sucked Minn-Erva’s lip between her teeth and bit down. “Shut the fuck up.” Her blood was pounding in her ears. “Were you this much of a bitch to Carol?”

“More. I like you better.” She undid her uniform, sliding it down until Maria could see her bare breasts, tipped with wide, soft nipples that were almost indigo. “I ate her cunt a few times, I didn’t say I sat around asking her her favorite color.”

 _Yellow,_ Maria thought. She licked at one of Minn-Erva’s nipples, but it refused to stiffen up underneath her tongue. She said, “Do you like this?”

“I’m low on nerve endings anywhere vulnerable,” Minn-Erva said dismissively, with a look on her face that implied she was tempted to yawn. “You’ll have to try a little harder.”

Like her body was as much a puzzle as her fucking uniform. Maria stripped her down; she tugged the tarp off the ship and spread it out, just enough of a blanket to keep them from scraping themselves raw against the concrete floor of her backyard hangar. It still hurt her knees to kneel down on it, but she wanted that, anyway; it felt right that this should feel at least as bad as it felt good. She found sensitivity right in the seam of Minn-Erva’s thighs, where her legs met her body, and when she licked and sucked there, her mouth tracing a stripe along Minn-Erva’s skin, Minn-Erva cried out, pressing her body against Maria’s mouth.

“Got you,” Maria said. “That makes all this two to zero.”

Minn-Erva’s wet, parted lips shifted into a scowl, and she hooked her legs around Maria’s waist and pulled her close, raising herself up at the same time. She ground their bodies together and then rolled, pressing her naked thigh between Maria’s legs.

She still hadn’t even taken her own clothes off. This wasn’t anything like anything she'd ever done before: dirt and their bodies bruised by the floor and Minn-Erva’s cunt almost against hers. Minn-Erva thrust over and over again, her hard-muscled thigh almost battering at her, and when Maria came, it was with a feeling like a rubber band inside her had finally snapped—more release, relief, than pleasure. Like she’d finally finished something she’d had to do.

She slipped out from Minn-Erva’s hold and sat up, rubbing at her eyes, which were hot, burning—but not wet. Maybe she was ashamed, but she wasn't sorry.

Minn-Erva was just watching her, nothing else. “You’re a tease,” she said finally, when it became clear Maria wasn’t going back to her body, to those dark junctures of her. She started getting dressed again, not bothering to get herself off if Maria wasn’t going to do it for her. But she hadn’t said that they were at least two to one now.

Months, she’d said. It might take months before someone found her.

The little meter on the wristband of her uniform was still in the red. She was still hungry.

Maybe they both were.

“Come on,” Maria said, helping her up. “Do what you’re going to do and then let’s go get burgers or something. More food. You’ll like it.”

“You can’t possibly want me to walk around your planet looking like this.”

Maria shrugged. “If they only see you once, they won’t know you always look like this. They’ll just assume it’s makeup. Why would an alien be going through a drive-thru with somebody?”

Minn-Erva sounded disgusted as she said, “That’s a good point.” She combed through her loose hair with fingers dark with machine oil, and then went back to working on tugging parts out of her ship and setting them up into something else, a kind of glittering pyramid with a satellite dish sticking out of it. Halfway through, she started explaining what she was doing, and then she said, “What’s a drive-thru?” Not looking up, with her eyelashes slanted still slanted down.

Maria told her.

“Your planet is ridiculous.”

“Yeah, it is,” Maria said. “But you’re going to be here a while.”

“Apparently.” She tossed the tarp back over her signal, its little dish now twitching erratically beneath its plastic covering. “All right. Let’s go.”

Her hand closed around Maria’s for just a second as they swung past each other; her grip was hard and her skin was hot as the sunbaked dirt. If Maria wasn’t careful, she’d wind up wanting to get to know her better, wanting to gorge herself on all this. And she’d never been the careful kind.


End file.
